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Dialectic Materialism--thoughts about freedom and propaganda

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At an atypical note in a forum like this, I want to talk a little bit about my thoughts on freedom, hegemony and communication. It is a logical topic for the week, as we read about state and revolution, side by side with the bifurcated view of communication--it is at the same time the site and process of oppression and resistance, in other words. This topic is more salient to me now because I was reading, for another course, Gramsci, which gave me nightmare vision of the author comparing hegemony to the freedom of prisoners within the surrounding walls, the freedom that he 'enjoyed' for the last eight years of his life. From the plethora of random ideas, I somehow delineated several strands of thoughts that I want to share with my classmates, and hopefully can generate some discussions from you.
1. About freedom, which is not one, but several. There's the reading of "freedom" in the sense of "free press" as expressed in John Milton's Areopagitica. The reading of "freedom" in the "worldwide press freedom index" generated by Reporter Sans Frontier is a different interpretation in many senses.
The difference here is almost as big as the difference between a "free market" and getting something "for free" in a market. Because communication is the product and tool of social interaction, so is the idea "freedom" construed and used in the power dynamics from its birth. In this sense, the word "freedom" is an oxymoron unless expressed and understood in the form of "whose freedom from whom of what". I remember having a discussion with an ex-colleague with a TV news channel about press freedom in China. The TV news reporter complained that government intervention prevents him from putting in stories that would "really be what the audience wanted". When I asked him what those articles were about, he said "NBA". The point I want to make here is that "freedom" as a communicative idea is created for the purpose and during the process of circumventing freedom.

2. Hegemony is a mechanism through which oppression is enacted through the production and application of language and communication. But the function of hegemonic oppression is carried out not through the act of creating language, but through language itself, void of the circumstances in which it is created. In his later works, even after gaining power in 1949, Mao repeatedly mentioned the importance of creating a new culture and new language for his plan of social change. Some of the terms he created, "paper tiger", "people's revolution", etc. were later branded as "propaganda". Which leads me to my second point. In the field of PR, "propaganda" belongs to the hideous, awkward past. Propaganda is the process of creating a terminology to define/identify (read: oppress) an entity (a class, for instance), but is rendered ineffective when this identification (read oppression) process gets identified itself by another oppressing agent. Thus, propaganda cannot exist by itself, but has to be in a dialectic relationship--a lexicon is not propaganda unless another competing lexicon identifies it as one. Having no ideology is the biggest ideology of all.

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